I have only been able to see this behavior on my system running the
kernel from the 2.4 XFS CVS tree. It is somewhat reproduceable.
The problem is that I started up a number of "rxvt" sessions and they
took well over a minute to start up. During that time, the cpu
utilization was almost nil. (Less than 1%)
There was a background find operation happening, and this seems to be
the key item.
I could not run top while waiting for the sessions to start. I could
not run "ps" either. Both blocked until the sessions finally came up
and thus they produced no useful information.
Is there some BKL that is being held longer than it should be in the
XFS code? The 2.4.18 non-XFS system does not show this behavior.
(Well, at least not to this degree. The find in the background does
slow things up a bit but only by a second or two, not over 60 seconds)
The machine has lots (more than 512Meg) of RAM and a fast (1GHz) PIII
Tulatin processor.
Is there something I should look at for you or is this a known issue?
--
Michael Sinz ---- Worldgate Communications ---- msinz@xxxxxxxxx
A master's secrets are only as good as
the master's ability to explain them to others.